Somdeep Chatterjee

The 2nd Amitava Bose Memorial Annual Workshop held at the IIM Calcutta campus on 11-12 July was a huge success. Brilliant talks by Dilip Mookherjee, Rohini Somanathan, Debraj Ray and Maitreesh Ghatak. Amazing presentations in the parallel sessions and some great networking in the hallways!!

#EconSky Delighted to announce the 2nd Amitava Bose Memorial Annual Workshop to be held at #IIM_Calcutta on 11-12 July 2025 in memory of Late Prof Amitava Bose. Stellar lineup of speakers for our special sessions but also a fantastic set of papers in parallel sessions.

Thrilled to announce that I have joined the editorial board of the #JournalOfDevelopmentStudies . i hope to be able to meaningfully contribute to the brilliant journey of #JDS as a leading outlet of research in development studies not limited to development economics but also other social sciences.

#EconSky Inviting submissions to the Amitava Bose Memorial Annual Workshop in July at IIM Calcutta. 3 weeks to the submission deadline. Submit now!!

Organizing this workshop in July. Consider submitting your work - great set of speakers - lovely campus in a vibrant city. Early monsoon is a great time to visit Kolkata and the beautiful and pristine IIM Calcutta campus!! Deadline: 25 May. Full papers only - all fields welcome.

Organizing this workshop in July. Consider submitting your work - great set of speakers - lovely campus in a vibrant city. Early monsoon is a great time to visit Kolkata and the beautiful and pristine IIM Calcutta campus!! Deadline: 25 May. Full papers only - all fields welcome.

Lighting the path to learning: Can electricity boost children’s test scores? When households gain access to electricity, children are more likely to be enrolled in school. But do they also perform better? Based on West Bengal’s universal household electrification programme and...

Contrary to most existing literature on null effects: using Indian data we show that access to electricity can in fact improve learning outcomes if the access is measured at HH level - allowing leveraging complementarities of inputs to the Educ Prod Fn. summary here: ideasforindia.in/topics/human...

3 - how parties select candidates is not obvious. While winnability is often a factor - We show that winning by garnering support of elite voters may act as a symbol of excess popularity of the candidate and such candidates are less likely to be given an opportunity to re-contest despite winning.

2 - urbanization usually comes at a cost of higher pollution. We show that sustainable urbanization models through place based policies can increase economic development while reduce pollution- potentially through economies of scale in pollution abatement costs due to clustered approach.

Looking fwd to an eventful summer of research. Focussed on readying drafts of 3 new papers which I am very excited about. 1- studying the perverse consequences of doorstep delivery of contraceptives. Such interventions relax access constraints but accentuates within household ideological conficts.

This is amazing news. Congratulations Tarun - richly deserved!!

Who benefits from appeals to vote? Evidence from a get-out-the-vote (GOTV) campaign in India - Public Choice Get-out-the-vote (GOTV) campaigns are fairly popular as a policy instrument to increase democratic participation and voter turnout. While most GOTV drives target individual voters by nudging them to v...

Late Update: Our GOTV paper is now available online at #PublicChoice journal. We basically show that voters don’t like being told what to do!! link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Manmohan Singh: India's Finest Talent Scout (1932-2024)

Excellent history of India's economic team in 1990s and 2000s.

srajagopalan.substack.com/p/manmohan-s...

#EconSky New paper alert!! We revisit the motherhood penalty in the Indian labor market and show that mandated increase in paid maternity leaves affects contractual arrangements of employed mothers in the labor market. Now accepted at the #JournalOfDevelopmentStudies . Jt work with #SaheliBose.

#EconSky #HotOffThePress We experimentally estimate the labor mkt penalty for single mothers. While aggregate data shows that single moms have quite high LFPR - this masks the demand side discrimination which we uncover in our new #WP. Joint with #ShubhamOjha #RalitzaDimova

#EconSky organizing this doctoral conference in March. Submit your best work. Deadline in 15 days. Format: few papers, more discussion, plenty of networking.

#EconSky this may seem weird (or wil l it?)… what do you do if a co-author goes incommunicado on you for about a year? And I mean “incommunicado” literally - not responding to any communication from the other 2 co-authors. Any advice, suggestions, empathy etc appreciated!!

#EconSky Calling potential PhD applicants to join us for a rigorous PhD program. You will get guidance from some of the finest economists in India and work with a very enthusiastic faculty and peer group with cutting-edge research output. Financial Support available

www.iimcal.ac.in/doctoral-pro...

May want to check this out from one of my advisees, Shiv Hastawala. Its a pretty good compilation: www.shivhastawala.com/resources

Me trying to remember the name of the RA that did all analyses of a seminal paper that got me a $500,000 salary.

Just made the move from EconTwitter, so it's intro time! 👋

I'm a PhD candidate at UW-Madison. My research interests are in the economics of education and education policy (mostly higher ed), labor economics, and public economics.

Oh, and a shameless plug that i am on the job market this year 😉

Hello #EconSky
I am a Ph.D. Economics Candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I am an applied Microeconomist and work in Labor and Public Economics. You can learn more about me at sakshib.com

Hi #EconSky - time for my intro. I am a development economist working on topics in education, labor, gender and healthcare. Also have interests in political economy, particularly voting and electoral competition. I am working as an Assistant Professor at the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta.